Reader Response Draft 1

In the article of "Globalisation of Culture Through the Media", Kraidy (2002) has evaluated the highly debated issue on cultural imperialism and its alternatives. He mentions about a debate if the West is unfairly imposing their culture on Asian countries through the media. The inequality of the flow of information exists and is due to initiation of new media technologies intensify the debate. Kraidy stated that globalisation is seen to be a better alternative than cultural imperialism as it depicts the ever-changing complex environment which includes the different stakeholders would weaken individual nation’s cultural unity.

In the article, Kraidy stated the different views of how free flow of information is more advantageous to the Western countries. This is mainly due to the difference in the values and priorities held by Asian countries and the Western countries. For example, in the film-making industries, there have been clearly more bans in Asian countries such as Singapore and China as compared to western countries such as America. Majority of the reasons that these movies were banned was due to explicit and controversial images, violence and ideas that threatened the Asian’s more conservative values. With the promotion of free flow of information, this would encourage more Asian countries to lift movie bans and facilitate the flow of ideas from Western countries to Asian countries. This would be seen advantageous to the West as the Western countries have already been exposed to many open ideas and thus being able to handle it better. Even though I may agree that the initial increased flow of information may help the western countries, both economically and politically, but this may in turn help promote and strengthen Asian values on a long-term basis and may in turn influence Western countries to adopt some Asian values.

Therefore, having the argument that globalisation is better as it reflects a weakening of the individual nation’s states is indeed valid and substantial. The hybridisation and exchanging of cultures and values from different countries would form a “global culture” which will weaken any culture, and the free flow of information will only increase the pace of globalisation.

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